Four men were convicted of first-degree murder last Friday in the killing of Jacksonville rapper Julio Foolio. One of them, Sean Gathright, broke down crying in the courtroom as the verdict was read. The footage that trended over the weekend and has now been viewed millions of times.
Another defendant is going viral this week for the exact opposite reaction. Davion Murphy, 29, has not cried. During the penalty phase, as the jury weighs whether he should live or die, Murphy has been seen reading a magazine. He smiles. He laughs, not audibly, but visibly, his face and body giving it away. He makes no attempt to hide it. No poker face. No look of regret. Days earlier, during closing arguments, he had argued with the judge loudly enough to be warned multiple times before being removed from the courtroom. Surveillance footage from his arrest showed him alone in an interview room, pantomiming a shooting.
He has not apologized. He has not asked the jury for mercy. If you only followed the trial, you would think you were looking at a man with nothing left to lose and nothing to say. You would be wrong.
Davion Murphy had a reason to want Julio Foolio dead. And it did not start on the night of the murder. It started years earlier, at a high school football game, with a 19-year-old who never came home.
A rapper who named the dead
Charles Jones performed as Julio Foolio. He was one of Jacksonville’s biggest drill rappers and a documented member of 6Block, a gang locked in a years-long war with rival factions ATK and 1200.
His lyrics named the dead from the other side. Victims appeared in his songs like trophies. In a track titled “Beatbox Remix/Bibby Flow,” he referenced a teenager named Spazz being shot in the face. The song collected millions of views on YouTube.
Spazz’s real name was Joerod Adams. He was 19 years old when he was killed at a Raines High School football game in Jacksonville in August 2018. He was Davion Murphy’s cousin.
Some people are saying Davian Murphy stood on business for his family in Foolio murder case. Foolio’s side allegedly took the life of his cousin Joerod Murphy aka Spazz in Jacksonville, Florida pic.twitter.com/37moJSdD29
— Kollege Kidd (@KollegeKidd) May 13, 2026
A football game in Jacksonville
Roughly 4,000 people were at Raines High School that Friday night. Fifteen minutes after the final whistle, someone opened fire on the campus. Adams was shot in the face and killed. A 16-year-old girl and a 17-year-old boy were also wounded. Police called the shooting gang-related.
A 16-year-old named Robert Howard was arrested and charged with murder. Then the case collapsed. An eyewitness recanted her testimony and was arrested for perjury. One of the surviving victims reversed his statement and refused to cooperate. Howard eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter and received five years with credit for three and a half already served.
Jameelah Murphy, Joerod’s mother, told reporters she never got to see her son graduate or have children.
That was not the worst part.
What they did to his grave
After Joerod Adams was buried at a cemetery off West Moncrief Road, someone went to his grave and filmed what they did there. The video shows a person urinating on the headstone, spitting on it, and kicking over the flowers and balloons his mother had placed. The camera never shows a face. Only shoes. The footage made its way to Jameelah Murphy.
“It’s a stab in a mother, father, a loved one’s heart,” she told Action News Jax.
It was not a one-time event. Murphy said the grave was vandalized repeatedly over the years. The decorations she placed for her son kept disappearing.
Then the family lost someone else. Murphy has said publicly that her mother, Joerod’s grandmother, suffered a fatal heart attack tied to the years of grief.
During his interrogation, Davion Murphy told investigators his aunt became bedridden with depression. “Somebody pissed on my cousin’s grave,” Murphy said. “You gotta feel that.”
June 23, 2024
On June 14, 2024, Julio Foolio posted a flyer on Instagram promoting his 26th birthday party in Tampa.
Nine days later, two cars left Jacksonville. Prosecutors identified Davion Murphy as one of three masked gunmen who opened fire on Foolio in a hotel parking lot with AR-15-style rifles and a Glock pistol. Foolio was pronounced dead at the scene. Three other people were wounded.
The other suspects were arrested within weeks. Murphy ran. For six months, he evaded law enforcement until U.S. Marshals tracked him to a Jacksonville apartment complex.
The jury convicted him of first-degree murder and conspiracy in under eight hours.
The jury has not decided yet
The penalty phase is underway. Prosecutors want the death penalty. Murphy’s defense team has presented brain scans showing previous head trauma and expert testimony that he scored in the bottom three percent of his peers on intellectual assessments.
Outside the courtroom, the conversation has moved past expert witnesses. On social media, the framing is plain: he stood on business for his family.
What the jury may never fully measure is what happens to a person who watches his cousin get buried, watches someone film themselves desecrating that grave for content, hears his cousin’s name mocked in songs streamed by millions, and buries his grandmother behind the weight of all of it.
Foolio’s mother asked the jury in a statement to see her son as more than a rapper or a headline. Davion Murphy’s family has been in the courtroom too.
The verdict on whether he lives is expected by the end of the week.